


Shield-Maiden

by englishable



Series: Hieros Gamos [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-05
Updated: 2019-05-05
Packaged: 2020-02-26 12:47:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18717394
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/englishable/pseuds/englishable
Summary: Sif has found Thor once before, of course, though back then she knew where he was. It's a bit harder to find a man who has no path, but when she wakes up at the end of five years to find him gone Sif certainly means to try.





	Shield-Maiden

...

Sif wakes from a dream about gray ashes being scattered on the wind to find that five years have passed, since she last closed her eyes, but that her friends and her home and her people are still gone.

She follows a path made mostly of rumors and speculation until it sets her down on Earth, where a town clings like green kelp to the wet, smooth rocks of a northern shore. She reads a white sign by the roadside, surrenders her shield to the first man who greets her – they had taken her sword, when Odin exiled her, but they let her keep the shield for a reason Sif has not yet deciphered – and goes to meet a woman who bears the winged mark of the Valkyrie on her left arm.

“But where’s Thor?” she asks, after the woman has told her everything else. It is the question Sif saves for last because she is not certain she wants the answer. “He wouldn’t have left without good reason.”

“He wanted to leave,” the woman says. “I’d guess that’s reason enough. Didn’t say where he was going, though. I don’t suspect he’ll be back and I wouldn’t recommend you try to follow him, if that’s what you’re thinking – and who are you, again?”

…

She goes first to America and then west, west, west to a desert town that is called Puente Antiguo on some of the maps and Old Bridge – which is in fact what the name translates to – on others. At noon it is so hot the land looks white, but Sif still walks out through its shimmering barrenness until she finds a mark burned into the dry earth.

It is a circle perhaps fifteen feet wide. Its lines are faded but still form the braided, wending shape of an endless knot, placed where the Bifrost had once brought her. Sif stands at the center of the circle and closes her eyes.

They played this game together sometimes, as half-trained children: Sif would stand with a blindfold over her eyes and a practice sword in one hand, a wooden shield in another. Thor would circle just within the reach of her arm to strike out at her; Sif would feel the air move and attempt to parry him, a task made somewhat easier by his tendency to announce himself.

Here I am, he would say. Right here – oh, no, too slow, you’ve missed me. Here I am. Here.

He would knock her flat nine times in ten, of course, at least in the early days, but Sif kept up the practice for the inestimable privilege of knocking him flat every tenth time in turn, if only because he would always lie there on his back with his hands on his chest while he laughed.  

Now she spreads her arms and feels the desert wind lift around her. It sighs through the great, listening emptiness and she turns, slowly, like the needle of a compass, until something within her grows steady and Sif stops.

When she opens her eyes again she is facing east, so this is the direction she follows.

…

She sleeps in the crowded steerage of interplanetary cargo ships or in open wheat fields under skies with twin blue moons. She travels to places whose names she does not know and then to places whose names she does not bother to learn. She buys a second-hand sword whose balance rests too far down the blade for her liking.

It should be at least a little easier, really, this business of finding a man who is traveling in the company of a walking tree and a talking rabbit – or else it is a dog, perhaps. There is no general consensus.

Sif never stops in one place longer than three days, but in every place she finds the same few stories: never heard of him, never seen him, he was here but you missed him, and who is the man to you anyway that you’d track him across the galaxy this way? Who is this man that he should run so far from you and not look back?

I’m his friend, she always answers. He would do the same for me.  

Days turn into weeks and weeks turn into months. She passes long stretches of time without eating, which tires and bores her about as much as everything else does these days. The dirt from a hundred roads clings to her feet no matter how often she shakes it off. She does not look into mirrors but can feel her body being pared down, its bones becoming more defined beneath her skin until they have the clarity of grief. There is a lightness about her now, where there was once the weight of history and duty, but this lightness itself is an awful thing to carry because Sif realizes that it is the price of survival.

She remembers a rowan tree in the center of the palace training yard, its boughs heavy with tart red berries. She remembers Volstagg sitting with his children on his lap, Fandral rounding off a line of memorized verse, Hogun keeping his mouth pressed into a granite-hard line while laughter sparked behind his eyes. She remembers Queen Frigga as she took her last voyage alone into the quiet darkness of eternity. She remembers sharp, cold stars rising above Asgard’s sea – Sif would stand with the novices to teach them, on certain warm nights, showing them how to trace the constellations that could guide them home if they were lost – and the blue-gold morning behind its mountains. She remembers how Thor knew the mortal for three days and loved her while he knew Sif for a thousand years and did not. The woman called Valkyrie has told her that Heimdall is dead, that Odin is dead, that Loki is dead or as dead as a trickster raised by a witch is ever going to be.

Compared to all that, Sif thinks, she herself would seem poor recompense. Perhaps he has decided to let the dead stay dead and has counted her among them without question. He has been given no reason to think otherwise, though she wonders if he ever asked.

One night Sif cuts off her hair, down nearly to the scalp like a prisoner or a penitent. When she is finished she wraps the black length of it up with a red string and burns it.

…

But it does not make a difference, Sif decides, whether Thor has ever loved her in the way she has loved him. She knew even as a girl that she would one day pledge her shield, her loyalty and her life to the king’s service, as a warrior must, and knowing that the king would be Thor made it somehow less frightening.

Sif has always kept her love for him clenched tight around that knowledge, like the fist made when giving an oath. She keeps it there still.

And Sif might tell him – when she finds him, if she finds him, if he wants her to find him – that he will always be a king, whatever titles he holds or not. She has known him through his brashness as well as his wisdom and it has never been any other way: there is a certain strength of heart in him that no desolation can touch, the thing that always called the hammer back to him no matter the distance and that once brought him to the feet of the Destroyer saying take my life, take mine, take mine and end this.

Finally, in a city where she does not speak the language and on a planet she could not tell apart from any other distant star, Sif fits herself into a cellar doorway for the night and cries.

She does it for a long, long time, silently into her hands, and then she falls asleep.

…

It is in one of these strange cities – this one is out in the middle of a salt marsh; its foundations rise or fall with the tide – that Sif gets herself into a fight.

She is exhausted from three days without rest and tells the first man – there are three – that she does not wish to quarrel. The man does not understand her, or else he understands her and simply does not care.  

Either way, the result is the same:  

She sends the first one through a window and breaks the second man’s sternum with the iron pommel of her sword. She sees the blaster in the third man’s hand but not the knife in his other, which is what he uses to slash the brilliant ribbon of red through the muscles and tendons of Sif’s right arm. The sword drops from her hand.  

So Sif breaks the man’s nose with the shield on her left arm, instead, which is the detail everyone enjoys most about the story of the black-haired Asgardian woman with no name. Within a week it is a staple in every dive bar and backwater gambling house in that quadrant of the galaxy.

And she stayed on her feet, the tale-tellers add at the end. You’d think a wound like that would bring anybody down, nine times in ten, but no. There she stood.

…

Sif lies for three days on a low bed made of woven reeds. The room in which they keep her has no shade on its window and at dusk she can hear strange birds out in the salt marsh. They sound like women keening, or like flutes whistling. Sometimes Sif whistles back. It gives her time to consider.

Her arm feels hot beneath the bandages an old woman has wrapped there. She cannot close her sword-hand all the way and bringing the fingertips together causes a burning that goes straight to her bones.  They tell her the arm will heal, if she is careful, but not entirely. It may wither, or it may not, but the full strength will never come back to it and she is lucky to have kept the arm at all.

Well, Sif considers absently, there’s a funny kind of relief. Even if I could find him now, he wouldn’t have a use for me.

So she hopes that Thor is happy, wherever he has gone, or that he learns to be happy wherever he finds himself, because it would be an awful shame to have a laugh such as his – as brimming and abundant and friendly as a raised cup of golden mead – and never get to use it. She hopes he can allow himself to be happy.

Yes, that sounds about right. If he wishes to go, she ought to let him.

She is considering this when there is a noise from downstairs. Voices rise through the floor, one hushed and one so booming she nearly recognizes it even through the fever and fatigue. Someone climbs the stairs, quickly but not quite at a run as though to approach the room of a sleeping child, and when Sif looks twice Thor is standing in the doorway.

Sunlight from the window throws a strong shadow of his body against the wall. It catches in the fair strands of his long hair and in the darker tangle of his full beard. A heavy stomach presses against his belt and it lifts at the breath he draws when he sees her. One of his eyes is the wrong color.

He does not say anything, so Sif smiles. She has rehearsed this and knows what she should say.

But then something splits apart like an ice floe inside her, revealing all its jagged edges, and when Sif opens her mouth the voice that comes out is oddly playful and sing-song despite its hoarseness.

“Found you.”

(And she had decided five hundred years ago that there was nothing Thor could do that surprised her anymore, but she must admit that this does; he comes to her bedside, sinks to his knees and lays his head beside hers on the pillow so that his face will be hidden while he cries.

Sif, for the moment, is too tired to cry with him, but until she can do this she draws her shield-arm around the broad warmth of his back – there are plaits in his hair, she realizes, the sort his father used to wear – and holds it there. He raises one of his hands to cover hers.

“Sorry,” he says, finally, turning his head to look at her. “For a minute there I thought you were a dream.”)  

**Author's Note:**

> Kevin Feige discussed the idea that Loki, in the guise of Odin, had banished Sif prior to the events of Ragnarok, while I think it was Joe Russo who said Sif was dusted during Infinity War, and would therefore have been resurrected with everybody else in Endgame. 
> 
> Which means that somebody needs to right now immediately tell Thor that one of his best friends is still alive, both because I desperately want the man to be happy and because according to the original myths he owes Sif one (1) marriage and approximately three (3) children.


End file.
